Dungeon Solitaire LABYRINTH OF SOULS Designer’s Notebook by Matthew Lowes Illustrated with Original Notes Including a History and Commentary on the Design and Aesthetics of the Game. ML matthewlowes.com 2016 Copyright © 2016 Matthew Lowes All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. Interior design and illustrations by Matthew Lowes. Typeset in Minion Pro by Robert Slimbach and IM FELL English Pro by Igino Marini. The Fell Types are digitally reproduced by Igino Marini, www.iginomarini.com. Visit matthewlowes.com/games to download print-ready game materials, follow future developments, and explore more fiction & games. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction . 5 Origins . 5 Tomb of Four Kings . 7 Into the Labyrinth . 10 At the Limit . 13 Playing a Role . 15 The Ticking Clock . 16 Encountering the World . 17 Monsters of the Id . 18 Traps of the Mind . 18 Doors of Perception . 19 Mazes of the Intellect . 19 Illusions of the Psyche . 21 Alternate Rules . 22 Tag-Team Delving . 22 On Dragon Slaying . 23 Scourge of the Undead . 24 The Tenth Level . 25 A Life of Adventuring . 26 It’s in the Cards . 28 Extra Stuff . 30 The House Rules . 31 B/X & A . 31 Game Balance . 32 Chance vs Choice . 33 Play-Testing . 34 Writing Rules . 35 Final Remarks . 37 4 INTRODUCTION In the following pages I’ll be discussing candidly my thoughts on the creation of the Dungeon Solitaire game, including its origins, my rationale for the aesthetics and structure of the game, and for its various mechanics. Along the way I’ll be talking about some of my ideas about game design, and what I find fun and engaging about different types of games. It’s important to note this is a reflection on the process of creating the game. It doesn’t necessarily represent the design process as a whole, which has an intuitive component that is difficult to represent here. Nevertheless, I’ll be going through the game, making comments as I go. For those who are interested, I hope you’ll find this informal discussion entertaining and insight- ful, whether you’re just curious about the design process, or you’re a game designer yourself. ORIGINS I still remember vividly my first game of Dungeons & Dragons. It was 1981 and my dad had gotten a new game for me and my older brother. I was nine years old. Up until that point, my gaming experience consisted mostly of playing checkers, chess, hearts, Risk, and Monopoly with my dad, my mom, and my brother. At my grandparents’ we played poker, blackjack, and solitaire with the extended family. It was pretty clear this new game was something different though. For one thing, there were dragons! We played our first game of D&D as a family, sitting around the kitchen table. My dad was the dungeon master. My brother was a magic-user. My mom was a thief. And I played a fighter, who I think I named Perseus (I had recently seen Clash of the Titans). Our party set off to an ominous sounding “Keep on the Borderlands”, and after some time equipping ourselves with gear, 5 we ventured into the wilderness to seek our fortune in the dungeons nearby. That first foray into a dungeon is still as clear in my memory as if I had lived through it. We huddled together down stone lined corridors. Our flickering torches were barely enough to see by. The damp air and darkness closed in around us. We drew a map as we went, knowing full well we were doomed if we got lost down there. We forced one door open, picked the lock of another. And then we ran into a monster! Our first encounter was a lone hobgoblin, and it was terrify- ing! One hit could have killed any one of us. Someone mentioned running, but it was too late. Battle ensued. Dice were rolled. Damage was suffered. A spell was cast. In the end we prevailed, but I still remember how relieved we were just to have survived. That was an accomplishment itself. We had faced a monster and lived! After finding a few gold pieces, we retreated out of the dungeon as fast as our leather boots would take us, happy to see the light of day and breathe the open air. And I knew without a doubt that was the most exciting game I had ever played. Although my dad passed on the mantle of dungeon master, and my mom never reprised her role as thief, my brother and I went on to play many games of D&D, AD&D, Gamma World, Top Secret, and Star Frontiers. Around that same time we got an Apple II computer, and games like Wizardry, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord only added to our thirst for dungeon crawling. In our seemingly endless spare time, I was drawing my own dungeons, coding simple adventure games in Basic, and typing stories on my mom’s Smith Corona electric typewriter. The Empire Strikes Back was on at theaters, Battlestar Galactica was on TV, and The Savage Sword of Conan could be bought at the local drug store. It was a golden age! I mention all this both because it’s fun to think back on where all this started, and because in a very real way, Dungeon Solitaire is inspired by those old school roleplaying games. These days my 6 spare time isn’t quite as endless, and I wanted a simple, fast solo game that would evoke a classic dungeon crawl. After searching around a bit and not finding anything I was satisfied with, I got it into my head to design my own using a standard deck of playing cards. Thus was born, Tomb of Four Kings, the original Dungeon Solitaire game, which you can still find for free on my website. TOMB OF FOUR KINGS To talk about how I designed Labyrinth of Souls, I’ll need to talk about how I designed Tomb of Four Kings. The game mechanics for Tomb of Four Kings are the same as for the Labyrinth of Souls Basic Rules. That’s the essence of the game. Remove the major arcana, the pages, and the extra cards included with the Labyrinth 7 of Souls tarot deck, and what you have is a standard deck of playing cards. I had checked out a few dungeon crawling games that used playing cards, and I liked the idea because they’re portable and fairly common. But the games I had seen weren’t exactly what I wanted. Some required dice or tokens, or only focused on combat, or didn’t have the narrative component I was looking for. I wanted the game itself to generate a story as you played. And I wanted it to seem like a classic solitaire card game, even if it was also a dungeon crawling adventure. This brings me to my first design principle: make the game you want to play. While it can be important to eventually get feedback from outside play testers, it makes sense to seek it from like-minded players. In the end, you’ll never please everybody, so the most important thing is to believe in your vision, and figure out how to create the game you want to play. As I saw it, the main problem I had was representational. How do you represent a dungeon crawl with a deck of cards? There are, of course, many solutions to this problem. But the right solution would have to be fun, evoke a sense the adventure, and have the narrative element I was looking for. I wanted a game that could be played again and again, and still create exciting situations and unexpected outcomes. All games are abstractions in some way, but most have representational elements. And it is the balance between the abstract and the representational that engages the imagination. So my second design principle is this: leave space for the imagi- nation of the players. Just as in literature and art, a game should balance clarity of expression with enough ambiguity to allow the audience to use their imagination, to participate in the creation of the game and its interpretation. Still, my basic problem remained. On the one hand I had a vision of dark dungeons and dangerous adventures, on the other hand, a deck of ordinary playing cards. How would I bridge that gap? 8 As I often do when I’m faced with a creative problem, I stared out the window for a long time. Then I took a hot bath and pondered what I had to work with: four suits, ace through ten, jacks, queens, kings, and two jokers. The suits could be different challenges with the numbers representing difficulty. The face cards could be something special. These things made sense. But I started by envisioning the cards as forming the layout of a dungeon map, and that was a problem. The dungeon I envisioned was vast, labyrinthine, a sprawling mythic underworld. Not only could you never map such a dungeon, or even a significant portion of it with the 54 cards available, but seeing the map itself took much of the mystery out of the setting. Getting lost in the dark and never making it out had to feel like a real possibility. In short, the dungeon of your imagination is much scarier than the dungeon mapped out on the table before you. So how would I evoke this space, this setting for the adventure? It had to come from the player’s imagination.